Saint Joseph Catholic Church

“He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran, and you cannot have a nuclear Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result,” the president said on April 13. “I think he’s very weak on crime and other things.”

The president “was posting a joke” and removed the post because he “recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor in that case,” the vice president said.

Vice President Vance also weighed in disagreements between the Trump administration and the Pope, following President Trump’s social media post blasting the Pope.

“Stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church,” Vance said of the Pope. “And let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

“When they are in conflict, they are in conflict,” he added. “I don’t worry about it too much. I think it’s a natural thing. I’m sure it will happen in the future and it’s not that big of a deal that it happened in the past.”

“Faced with massacres and wars caused by the idolatry of power—by those who even presume to ‘enlist’ God on their side, offering religious justification for the killing of innocents—Pope Leo XIV has appealed to the overwhelming majority of people throughout the world who want peace, believe in peace, pray for peace, and build it day by day,” wrote Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication.

Tornielli added:

The words of the Pope, who has made peace the hallmark of his magisterium, are unequivocal both in identifying the ultimately diabolical root of war and in rejecting outright any revival of the claim that “God is with us.” No, God cannot be with those who massacre civilians. God is with those who suffer, with those who die beneath the rubble.

“The visit of Saint John Paul II to the Rome synagogue on April 13, 1986, was an extraordinary event,” said Cardinal Kurt Koch. “For the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome entered a synagogue to bear witness before the world to his appreciation for the Jewish religion and the Jewish people.”

“The Pope emphasized that the Catholic Church has a relationship with Judaism unlike that with any other religion,” Cardinal Koch added. “In particular, through this visit to the Rome synagogue forty years ago—as well as through many of his other important statements on Catholic–Jewish dialogue, various eloquent gestures, and the personal friendships he maintained with members of the Jewish people—Pope John Paul II charted a significant course for the future of reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Judaism.”

“How can one fail to reflect on the resentment being generated among younger generations by the massacres of civilians in Gaza and now in Lebanon?” asked Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication. “And how can the same question not be asked with regard to the war in Ukraine and the many other regions scarred by hatred and violence?”

Tornielli added:

The voice of peace of the Successor of Peter, the Vicar of the defenseless Son of God who chose the nonviolent path of self-sacrifice on the Cross, resonates even more powerfully when it rises from this land [Algeria], where the Church is an absolute minority and where the witness of the very few Christians is all the more essential—grounded in service and in sharing the joys and sufferings of all.

The martyrs were “witnesses of Jesus; in them, Christ’s victory over death became fidelity, strength and surrender,” Pope Leo wrote in his message, dated April 8 and released on April 11.

“You are called not only to remember them, but to draw strength from their example so that Christ may walk your streets once more, so that the Church may regain her zeal, so that the truth of the Gospel may open those tombs into which so many hearts have turned, and thus Easter may become present here and now through Christian lives that are light, courage, and a joyful proclamation,” the Pope added.

The Commission, an advisory body at the service of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, is devoting its plenary assembly this year to the theme of suffering and sickness in the Bible, as it did in 2023 and 2024. The 2025 assembly was cancelled because of Pope Francis’s death.

“In Christ, suffering and illness are no longer a cruel destiny before which we must bow without understanding,” Pope Leo wrote in his message, dated March 27 and released on April 13. “With Jesus, pain is transformed into love, into redemption, and into fraternal help. Let us, then, welcome Christ into our lives: He is the only physician who can heal the illnesses of the soul forever.”

The Pope added:

Let us contemplate in particular the Sorrowful Mother together with Jesus at the foot of the Cross: as Mother, she suffers on Calvary the sufferings of her Son and shares in them with a heart full of faith, offering her piercing sorrow for the good of all. In this way, her intercession acquires for us a unique value.

The example of the Mother invites every believer, not only to pray for their brothers and sisters, but also to imitate the humble offering of their own sufferings in union with the Sacrifice of Christ.

Pope Leo XIV concluded the first day of his apostolic journey to four African nations with an address to Algerian Catholics in the Basilica of Our Lady of Africa in Algiers, the capital of Algeria (video).